Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [222]
1 Written by Denis Cannan, it ran eight months at the Ambassadors. Isabel left the cast before the end of the run.
2 Iradj Bagherzade inveigled me into an unsuccessful attempt to sell encyclopaedias to American servicemen in Germany during my first summer at Oxford. I sold four sets in ten weeks, one to a family who defected to the Soviet Union.
3 Friends from Oxford days.
1 Nigel was one of the cast of the Oxford Revue at the Edinburgh Festival in 1964, with Terry Jones, Annabel Leventon, Doug Fisher and myself. He married the actress April Olrich.
1 As Updike had his Rabbit, Al had his Fish – Leo Fish, his alter ego and central character of all his novels.
1 Designer of the first Python book.
1 This version, directed by John Guillermin, starred Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange.
2 Katherine Greenwood, née Palin, my father’s younger sister.
1977
1977 began with a new departure for the Palin family, a winter sun holiday. We spent two weeks on the West Indian island of Tobago. Helen learnt to stay up on one water-ski and the children loved being by the beach, but according to my entry of January 13th I had mixed feelings about it.
‘Seldom have I enjoyed a holiday as much and wanted to get home as much,’ I wrote. ‘I have a feeling my brain could atrophy in this alluringly beautiful part of the Caribbean.’ Once home, and back in my hair shirt, I worked on an article about the holiday for Lee Eisenberg of Esquire, and took it personally to him in New York, only to find he’d resigned from the magazine.
Meanwhile my father’s condition had deteriorated and he was now permanently in bed at Blythburgh Hospital, just outside Southwold. His previous accommodation, St Audry’s at Bury St Edmunds, had been built as a lunatic asylum, this one as a workhouse.
Monday, January 31st, Southwold
Even the old workhouse at Blythburgh looks like a French chateau in the crisp sunny beauty of this winter’s afternoon. Father is lying in bed, with the iron side up, like a cot, his glasses off, his face so thin, his eyes shut and mouth open. He looks more like a corpse.
For a while he seems bewildered, his eyes stare, as he’s probably just woken up. Then he sees us and his look softens a bit. Colour returns to his face, and he manages to get more words out than usual, though hardly any complete sentences, so you don’t really know what he’s saying.
Much entertainment from the rest of the ward, though. One rugged-looking old man with large, piercing eyes, beckoned urgently towards us. When Ma went over to speak to him, he fixed her with a very serious gaze and asked her if she was wanted by the police.
At the next door bed, from behind the curtains, meanwhile, repeated BBC radio acting cries of’Gawd! Oh my gawd! Oh gawd! Gawd! Gawd! Oh bloody gawd!’ I was told that this stream of half-hearted, and yet strangely heart-felt cries is a common sound in the ward.
When I first came here to see Dad, it was an unfamiliar world, from which I rather shrank back. The sight and sound of twenty old men in one room takes a little getting used to. Now I feel much easier and happier there. The nurses are not only dedicated, but, I think, cheerful and sensible.
Back to Croft Cottage for local fish (delicious) and a bottle of Alsace and a game of Scrabble and to bed with Doctorow’s Ragtime. In the company of Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit and Commander Peary of the US Navy, January dwindled.
Tuesday, February 1st, Southwold
After lunch, drove over to Blythburgh to see Dad. He was in his chair today, dressed and looking much improved. His lack of speech is still the greatest drawback, but he responded with pleasure to seeing us. He seems to drift off, though – as if his concentration easily goes, and he sometimes stares fixedly at some point, as if seeing something we haven’t. His fingers pick at surfaces and edges – whether it’s the corner of the sheet on his bed, or the wooden rim of his